Healthy City Harvests

Urban Harvest is the CGIAR system wide initiative in urban and peri-urban agriculture, which aims to contribute to the food security of poor urban Healthy city harvests: families, and to increase the value of agricultural production in urban and peri-urban areas, while ensuring the sustainable management of the Generating evidence to guide urban environment. Urban Harvest is hosted and convened by the policy on urban agriculture International Potato Center. URBAN Editors: Donald Cole • Diana Lee-Smith • George Nasinyama HARVEST e r u t l u From its establishment as a colonial technical school in 1922, Makerere c i r University has become one of the oldest and most respected centers of g a higher learning in East Africa. Makerere University Press (MUP) was n a b inaugurated in 1994 to promote scholarship and publish the academic r u achievements of the university. It is being re-vitalised to position itself as a n o y powerhouse in publishing in the region. c i l o p e d i u g o t e c n e d i v e g n i t a r e n e G : s t s e v r a h y t i c y h t l a e H Av. La Molina 1895, La Molina, Lima Peru Makerere University Press Tel: 349 6017 Ext 2040/42 P.O. Box 7062, Kampala, Uganda email: [email protected] Tel: 256 41 532631 URBAN HARVEST www.uharvest.org Website: http://mak.ac.ug/ Healthy city harvests: Generating evidence to guide policy on urban agriculture URBAN Editors: Donald Cole • Diana Lee-Smith • George Nasinyama HARVEST Healthy city harvests: Generating evidence to guide policy on urban agriculture © International Potato Center (CIP) and Makerere University Press, 2008 ISBN 978-92-9060-355-9 The publications of Urban Harvest and Makerere University Press contribute important information for the public domain. Parts of this publication may be cited or reproduced for noncommercial use provided authors rights are respected and acknowledged, and a copy of the publication citing or reproducing this material is forwarded to the publishers. Published by the International Potato Center (CIP), convener for Urban Harvest and Makerere University Press. Correct Citation: Cole, DC, Lee-Smith, D & Nasinyama, GW (eds) 2008, Healthy city harvests: Generating evidence to guide policy on urban agriculture, CIP/Urban Harvest and Makerere University Press. Lima, Peru. Produced by the CIP Communication and Public Awareness Department (CPAD) Indexing Marc Michalak Design and Layout Elena Taipe and contributions from Graphic Arts Printed in Peru by Comercial Grafica Sucre Press run: 1000 October 2008 HEALTHY CITY HARVESTS: GENERATING EVIDENCE TO GUIDE POLICY ON URBAN AGRICULTURE Contents V Foreword VII Acknowledgments III XI Dedication 1 INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER 1. Can the city produce safe food? CONTENTS 15 SECTION A • PERSPECTIVES 17 CHAPTER 2. Urban food production in Kampala: community perceptions of health impacts and how to manage them 31 CHAPTER 3. Researchers’ approaches to evidence on urban agriculture and human health 49 CHAPTER 4. Healthy urban food production and local government 67 SECTION B • FOOD SECURITY, NUTRITION AND URBAN AGRICULTURE 69 CHAPTER 5. The Association between household food security and urban farming in Kampala 89 CHAPTER 6. Nutritional security of children of urban farmers 104 Editors’ Commentary 109 SECTION C • HEALTHY HORTICULTURE IN CITIES 111 CHAPTER 7. Assessment of heavy metal contamination of food crops in wetlands and from vehicle emissions 133 CHAPTER 8. Estimating children’s exposure to organic chemical contaminants 151 CHAPTER 9. Biological hazards associated with vegetables grown on untreated sewage-watered soils in Kampala 170 Editors’ Commentary 175 SECTION D • MANAGING URBAN LIVESTOCK FOR HEALTH 177 CHAPTER 10. Household risk factors associated with chicken rearing and food consumption in Kampala 193 CHAPTER 11. City dairying in Kampala: integrating benefits and harms 211 Editors’ Commentary HEALTHY CITY HARVESTS: GENERATING EVIDENCE TO GUIDE POLICY ON URBAN AGRICULTURE 217 SECTION E • URBAN GOVERNANCE FOR HEALTH 219 CHAPTER 12. The story of the health coordinating committee, KUFSALCC and the urban agriculture ordinances 231 CHAPTER 13. Urban governance for healthy and sustainable cities: the role of agriculture 247 Contributors 249 Acronyms 254 Index HEALTHY CITY HARVESTS: GENERATING EVIDENCE TO GUIDE POLICY ON URBAN AGRICULTURE Foreword Richard Stren Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto The subject of this book has been an important one to many of us – both V researchers and policy-makers – for many years now. It has been important since so many urban residents, both in developed, and developing countries, have been raising animals and cultivating fruits and vegetables to enhance their incomes and to improve their families’ food security. These activities, invisible to many, have at best been defined as “illegal” or a “concern”, even though they are widely FOREWORD practiced. But in very recent months, just preceding the completion of the book, the issue of urban food supply has become a matter of extreme apprehension and even alarm. Why? Note the following, typical headlines over the last six months: “Forget oil, the new global crisis is food”, “Soaring food prices threaten stability” “Fear of rice riots as surge in demand hits nations across the Far East”, and “World in grip of food crisis”. Clearly, what was already a tight situation for millions of the urban poor in cities across the world – but particularly in the poorest developing countries – has become even more widespread and desperate. Urban food supplies are not only an important and central policy issue, but in some countries they are the central policy issue. At this writing I do not have any special insight into what will be the outcome of the current spiral of tight food supplies and dramatically higher prices for staple commodities. Because of high energy prices and very inelastic wages and incomes for the majority of the world’s poor urban dwellers, the results cannot be positive. But what this emerging situation serves to underline, ever more dramatically over time, is the great importance of finding ways and means for urban dwellers to cultivate and produce even more of the food they need for subsistence, and for their local governments to support them in this effort. I say “local governments” because – although other levels of government such as the provincial/state and national levels are undoubtedly very important – it is at the local level that regulations and bye-laws are most often passed which apply in the most direct fashion to the cultivation and use of land for agricultural purposes. All over the world, local governments have been given HEALTHY CITY HARVESTS: GENERATING EVIDENCE TO GUIDE POLICY ON URBAN AGRICULTURE much of the power to regulate land use in cities and towns, even if their regulations can be overlaid by legislation at other levels, and even if their ability to actually enforce their own regulations and bye-laws is sporadic at best and often arbitrary in its execution. From the perspective of local governments, this is one of the first books which explores, in a truly multidisciplinary fashion, the complex range of issues which both help explain why urban agriculture takes place, and looks carefully at the important obstacles to its effective uptake in a particular local context. From different professional viewpoints we learn about health benefits of urban farming for children’s nutritional status, about health risks from heavy metal and organic contaminants in food and about the proper management of urban livestock to reduce risk. We also learn about the history of public health efforts to control illness and disease in 19th century Europe and America, as a backdrop to the construction VI of colonial building and public health regulations that were commonplace in African cities by the 1940s. But as restrictive as these regulations were, they became even tighter and more aggressively defended in the post-colonial period, particularly with respect to the informal sector and the pursuit of agriculture in FOREWORD large metropolitan areas. Elsewhere I have written about the quasi-permanent “state of war” between municipal authorities and informal sector hawkers (many of whom are women selling food they have either produced or purchased in the city). Urban agriculture has often been a victim of this war, but the losers are not only the poor producers (mostly women, at least in East Africa), but also the majority of the population – since in many cities, the majority of the population are living close to pure subsistence levels. Luckily, there is a ray of light in this otherwise dreary account. We can applaud the dedication of those who have lobbied for a more flexible and supportive approach to what should be considered (in most respects) a positive, rather than an illegitimate and unacceptable practice. And partly as a result of their dedication, we have the story in this book of how, based on past research and advocacy and on the more recent influence of the CGIAR’s Urban Harvest program, the Kampala City Council had the wisdom to pass a series of Ordinances defining the conditions under which urban agriculture can, henceforth, be carried out in the municipal area. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a serious legislative reform has been developed to support urban agriculture. One hopes other cities, facing many of the same problems, will also see the light. The researchers who grace the pages of this book have helped us to see the invisible, and to see it in a realistic, but positive fashion. Toronto, June 2008 HEALTHY CITY HARVESTS: GENERATING EVIDENCE TO GUIDE POLICY ON URBAN AGRICULTURE Acknowledgments Producing this book involved an enormous number of people and institutions VII worldwide.

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